Quirk

It was brought to my attention last week that I've been slowing down on my blog entries. I realized that I had and wandered why. After some reflection, it occurred to me that I've slowed down on my entries because farm life is less quirky now.

When I first started this blog, I figured it would only be entertaining because farm life is unfamiliar and quirky. As in, "Hey, I milked a goat today" or "The cows got out!" How weird and quirky my life has become here on a farm. This crazy suburbanite kid having adventures. Maybe that's untrue, maybe that's not all that was interesting, but it's what I focused on. Just like reading my sister Becca's blog about Peace Corps in Burkina Faso. I wanted to read about all the crazy things in Africa and see how different they were from my life. Outsider looking in kind of thing.

But, as I've gotten used to the farm, things aren't as strange. More normal. So I've had less quirkiness to report. And it's also occurred to me that life on a farm isn't all that quirky. Sure, it seems to be, because we're all so distant from farms now. But it's not. Besides hunting, farming is one of the oldest human professions, and it's concerned with the most fundamental aspects of human life. Surviving, eating, working, the struggle of eking out a life on this small planet. Once I reconnected to that, I realized that farming is, in fact, not strange at all. It's caught up in the buzz of "organics" and "local food", and this, I think, has distorted people's ideas about farming, making it into something alternative and liberal. White bearded hippies hanging out with carrots, dancing naked in fields. But farming is ordinary, the most basic act of life, and reconnecting to that act is very rewarding. Not for everybody, maybe, but there's something about reengaging life on such a basic level that feels good, and I think this is why people are getting back into it. Not because they're Democrats, or dirty, or severely misguided, but because this is what ordinary people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Which makes me question the way we gage normalcy. What is normal? The new phenomenons of suburban/industrial life that have risen up in the past century, or the traditional, common agricultural lifestyles that have persevered since before human history? Do I know what I'm talking about? Kind of.